Excellence in Technology Innovation

Excellence in Technology Innovation: Recognizes vendors that have rolled out an innovative learning technology for a client such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, apps, video, social collaboration tools or games and simulations.

Gold

Mary Samples

SweetRush

Bridgestone Tires faced a challenge in trying to keep the attention of sales associates at independent tire dealers who had little incentive to complete training. Bridgestone’s Consumer Tire Education team partnered with SweetRush to design a training program to get employees on board by promising the program would make them better salespeople — and therefore provide the potential for more money.

Sales associates are mostly male and many are between 20 and 35 years old. To account for this audience, the program uses gamification, badges and ranks and is designed to feel similar to a video game. Overall, the Tire Education learning program has more than 120 e-learning courses, videos, learning games and instructor-led training.

Even though the training is not mandatory, more than 400,000 courses have been completed and more than 17,000 learners have earned badges. While the industry Net Promoter Score benchmark is 19 percent for corporate learning and development, this program received a score of 57 percent. Anecdotal feedback was also positive, with some more-experienced associates reporting it to be the best training they’ve received in decades and new associates reporting higher confidence.

Silver

Chronus

Seena Mortazavi

Mentoring has always been important at Daimler Trucks North America. But the manufacturer’s original mentoring program was based on social learning software that didn’t have the right structure or user experience, leaving the mentors and mentees with little guidance.

To answer the challenge, the company partnered with Chronus to build a mentoring program that was scalable and could support blended learning, leadership and corporate culture initiatives. Chronus focused on setting goals for mentors and mentees to learn new skills and enhance their current skills. Automation features helped reduce administrative time so Daimler could focus on increasing participation. Over the past year, Daimler has seen a 300 percent participation increase in the mentoring program with more than 1,800 participants today. The company also reported a 90 percent satisfaction rate.

Bronze

Rustici Software LLC

Through Rustici Software LLC, the SANS Institute deployed a content as a service solution called Content Controller to centrally host content and deliver it to customers. With Content Controller, SANS Institute minimized the risk of inaccurate content by automatically updating and managing all content for customers across learning management systems, resulting in a 90 percent reduction in time spent updating existing content.

Ave Rio is an associate Editor at Chief Learning Officer magazine. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.